Jeh Johnson: ‘Felt Like the World Was Coming to an End’ when Border Numbers Were a Fraction of what They Are Now

On Monday’s broadcast of “NewsNation Now,” former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson stated that the reported numbers of apprehensions along the border are multiple times the numbers that “felt like the world was coming to an end” when he ran DHS.

Johnson said, “The problem is, in fact, much larger than what we dealt with nine, ten years ago. The high for me when I was in office was May 2014. There were 68,000 apprehensions then in that month. That felt like the world was coming to an end. Now, the smugglers know how to move much larger numbers of people and there are more countries contributing to the problem. Two alarming statistics I heard over the weekend were 8,900 apprehensions in a single day on our southern border. And, for the first time, according to Mexican authorities, there are more South Americans arriving on their southern border than there are Central Americans. … You’ve also got Haiti, Cuba now contributing to this. It is a much, much bigger problem, and you have to deal with this problem at the source. The push factors, Connell, always overwhelm whatever defense we can put on our southern border. So, this needs to be, for the Biden administration, for the U.S. government, an all-hands-on-deck, whole-of-government effort to address this crisis. It turns politics upside down. It’s turning cities upside down, like New York City specifically.”

He added, “The administration did a good job in May of dealing with the end of Title 42. … That ended, the administration emphasized there’s a right way and a wrong way to enter this country, and the numbers dropped dramatically. But they were bound to go back up again as long as the underlying push factors exist.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett